Keeping the conversation flowing with Rosa requires no effort at all. Over dinner she is a wellspring of Byron anecdotes. Every Byron researcher or player makes the pilgrimage to Messolonghi, and to visit Messolonghi is to be entertained by Rosa. She recently had a Channel 4 film crew in town. Rupert Everett, an actor who was playing Byron for a docudrama, asked her if she is in love with Byron.
’How crass!’ she reports. ‘In Greece we cannot say this. You cannot be in love with a ghost. I am content to say I love his spirit, but Everett is an Englishman.’
I ask her what she loves about his spirit.
’We Greeks love his spirit because he loved us. No one else did. We did not love ourselves. We did not know who we were, what we had once been, what we could become. Only Byron saw this, and gave his life for it. He was our rallying cry. We love his spirit because he saw what we could be and the world followed him.’
Now over a jolly dinner, as Rosa is fine shaving a recently wriggling eel and I am whirling a particularly recalcitrant spaghetti put tanesca around a fork is not the time to qualify any of this, and anyway if it’s a feeling it has its own truth away from facts and figures. The facts and figures would suggest that Byron had a marginal practical effect on the War of Independence, certainly compared to Lord Liverpool and in particular Foreign Secretary and then Prime Minister George Canning. They drew up the Treaty of London in 1827 whereby the Great Powers suggested to Turkey that as Greek independence was a self-fulfilling prophecy a war over it was in no one’s interest. When the Turkish and Egyptian fleets failed to withdraw later that year Admiral Codrington sank them in the Battle of Navarino and Greek independence was assured.
I ask her if, as it seems to me, Byron’s life had reached a stage by Messolonghi in 1824 where death was the only logical conclusion.
’Yes, he had lived thirty-six years but also you could say a hundred years. Some people measure a life by the quality of their heartbeats. Don’t forget that at the time the two most famous men in Europe were Napoleon and Byron. They lived more in a month than most people live in a lifetime.’
’Some people say Byron was the world’s first celebrity,’I suggest,’and that he gave his celebrity as much as his life to Greece. His death he reunited the Greeks around the cause as you said, but outside Greece it drew enormous attention to the cause, inspired Delacroix and thePhilhellenes, and for the politicians made Greek independence an idea whose time had come, one they could not ignore. It’s hard to suggest a modern equivalent, but say J. K. Rowling took up the cause of independence for Cabinda. At the very least it would go from page 35 to the front page.’
’Where’s Cabinda? At least everyone knew about Greece,’ she replies.
’Good point, I suppose there is no modern equivalent.’
’Diana and the land-mines,’ she says, ‘yes, celebrity makes a difference, and you, do you love his spirit too?’ she asks.
’No, not really,’ I reply, ‘I mean I don’t not love it, it’s just that I only really know him as a young man in the Grand Tour years,between twenty-one and twenty-three. His spirit, if we mean metaphysical spirit, was still young too, and being formed by all these extraordinary external experiences. I think this was the most exciting time in his life. He was new to the world and the world was new to him. The spirit that died here fifteen years later was, in a way,somebody else’s.’
’He didn’t really know Greece as Greece on this first visit,’ she says.
’Not at all. On his first visit here he was still with Ali Pasha’s escort and would have thought he was still in Albania, which in effect he was. His first contact with Greek consciousness, any talk of independence, was with Andreas Londos two weeks later. And it was the week after that he visited Delphi and came into his first direct contact with Ancient Greece and the myths and history he knew from school. He was a changed man as far as Greece was concerned a month after he passed through here on that first visit.’
I don’t like to pursue it as it might upset Rosa with her two great passions, Greece and Byron, but it seems to me that Byron loved Greece and Greece loves Byron because they were both cauldrons of contradictions. Byron was a poet and a boxer, beautiful yet deformed, of masculine and feminine inclination, a republican and a social elitist who despised the attitude of the wealthy yet loved their wealth, an enormous commercial success who refused royalties, a radical who would outrage society in the morning and sup with it in the evening, the most loyal friend and the most careless suitor, a vegetarian and a marksman, a hater of humbug who perfected his own image, a lover of life who preferred it retold as legend. It was at this particular legends and myths crossroads that he met Greece, and the Greece he saw was noble legend against worthless life, where the sons of Apollo had become the serfs of the Turks, where those few who did know better forsook Athens for Byzantium, rhetoric for argument, practicality for idealism. To Byron Greece was above all an idea, an ideal, Aristotelian nous, and it inspired in his soul a passion that these kinsmen of Homer and Virgil should rediscover the glory that was Athens and Arcadia, that among the squabbling warlords and feckless hoi polloi a natural successor to Pericles would arise to lead them into a modern version of Plato’s Republic. It was fortunate that Byron was not one to be weighed down by details.
Over coffee - and of course one must say Greek coffee and not Turkish coffee - followed by delicious Greek Delight, we discuss the riddle of Byron’s succession. It goes like this. During the War of Independence many a long evening was taken up discussing, no doubt with the usual Greek fervour for political theory, the governance of Greece post-independence. The Napoleonic experience had destabilised political thought as it swerved from republic to empire to monarchy. The Great Powers, who in the political vacuum left behind by four centuries of Ottoman subjugation would eventually decide the new Greek constitution, had their own constitutional axes to grind, and political axis to protect. When the great day came in 1832 the Convention of London declared Greece should be an absolute monarchy. But who was to be the absolute monarch? There was no Greek pretender who did not immediately stir up equal animosities. There was no obvious European pretender either, nor any princely volunteers. Eventually, faute de mieux, the teenage Otto of Bavaria, second son of Ludwig I, was declared king, and he became King Otto of Greece. There seems no doubt that if Byron was still alive he would have been offered the role - they would have had to offer him the role - and the parlour game is: would the republican Byron have accepted the throne and become King George of Greece? Rosa thinks not, and I don’t know our kid as well as Rosa does, but I think he would have accepted it like a shot, and taken it seriously too. The costumes! The pageant! The protocol!
But like Byron and Hobhouse two hundred years ago, my time in Messolonghi needs to be short, and like them I take the short sea passage over the Gulf of Corinth to Patras. Messolonghi brings home the degree of affection Greece still holds for Byron; Vyron is still a popular boy’s name and in 2008 the Greek government declared 19 April, the anniversary of his death, a national holiday. Statues adorn every town he visited, plaques commemorate every house in which he rested. Byron Streets and Byron Squares are everywhere. Reasonably enough, the Byron whom Messolonghi remembers is the 1824 martyr and not the 1809 Grand Tourist. While at Messolonghi, on his thirty-sixth birthday and three months before he died, he wrote this clear acknowledgment of all that had come to pass, almost as a memorandum to himself, and where he knew it would lead.
My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!
The Sword - the Banner - and the Field,
Glory and Greece, around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.
Awake! (not Greece - she is awake!)
Awake, my spirit - think thro
ugh whom
Thy Life blood tracks its parent lake,
And then strike home!
Tread those reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood; - unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of beauty be.
If thou regret’st thy youth, why live?
The Land of honourable Death
Is here - up to the Field! and give
Away thy Breath.
Seek out - less often sought than found,
A Soldier’s Grave - for thee the best,
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy Rest.
Chapter Eleven
FROM PATRAS TO ATHENS, MYTHS AND ORACLES
22 NOVEMBER - 24 DECEMBER 1809 | 25 APRIL - 23 MAY 2009
Like Byron, Hobhouse, Fletcher, Vassily, and Georgiou the dragoman, the whole party recently joined by one of the Albanian guards, Dervish Tahiri, the more compact Strathcarron entourage of the writer and his wife left Messolonghi for Patras by boat. The Byron contingent were rowed all the way on a windless day, initially through the shallows and marshes which surround the town, the Strathcarron contingent relied on dear old Mr. Perkins to chug them along thechannel, newly dug and banked through the salt fields.
On the way one still passes a waterborne village which remains much as Hobhouse described it. Shacks built on sticks rest on the water like so many wading spiders, and the fishermen surround their plots of marsh with wattle reed fences against the lapping waves. Wooden dinghies, seemingly overburdened with the paraphernalia of nets and buoys, rollers and pulleys, bob up and down at the end of these amphibious gardens. Two or three shacks have evolved into enjoying windows and doors, incongruously garish paint schemes and plastic roofs and porches. Out boarded dories are tied to a leaning post. As one glides past one automatically thinks ‘how charming’, but fears the reality would be ‘how ghastly’.
At Messolonghi I had to meet the mayor for a photo-opportunity - his photo-op, I might add. Churchill said the Greeks were five
million people with five million opinions, and as Byron was to discover fifteen years after his first visit here two Greeks who agreed about anything were seldom to hand when you needed them. Whenever one wanders into a Greek bar and is distracted by the blaring telly, hard to avoid unless one is auditorily challenged, there always seems to be the same scene playing on the screen. Across the bottom half will sit a panel of half a dozen pundits discussing the cause du jour. Above them the screen will split into close-ups of whoever is talking at the time. There are always three of them, regularly there will be four, if you are lucky five, and there’s no reason to suppose that from time to time all six talking heads will be talking heads at the same time.
I mention all this because at the meeting with the mayor there were always several conversations going on at once, various randomers like me wandering in and out, the raising of voices, and then the conciliatory gestures, the beating of breasts and then hugging of shoulders. When he had worked his way back to me, the mayor, a delightfully congenial red-hot socialist called Angelos, asked how I found Messolonghi. I said that I thought the fishermen’s shacks on the way in from the Gulf were wonderfully evocative, but this was enough to set him off on a rant about the unfair development of uncontrolled capitalism. Later I found out that some of the more commercially minded fishermen had discovered the benefits to be had from eco-tourism, and turned their shacks into bijou cabins, and hence the doors and windows, garish paint, leak-proof roofs, hammocks in porches and smart new dories. Half the mayor’s room was following the conversation, and when one of them translated it the other half joined in and pretty soon we were in a living metaphor of Greece as twelve million splinter groups who occasionally and with great reluctance form uneasy and short-lived coalitions; but the rancour has no depth, and moments later dissolves into querulousness, then apathy - but not for long! - then an opinion, then someone else’s opinion, a brief respite, take a deep breath and off we go again.
But I digress. Patras. They made the considerable detour to Patras in the hope that waiting at the consul’s house (the last British one before Constantinople) would be news and letters from England, and in Byron’s case remittances from Hanson. They had already met the Greek-born English Consul, Samuel Strané, in Malta and more recently here in Patras on their one-hour stopover eight weeks earlier, but unfortunately he had no packages waiting for them. There was, however, hope: he reported that the next convoy was expected within days, and they were welcome to lodge for as long as they liked. In the event they stayed twelve days in Patras, and only left when the convoy eventually arrived empty handed.
To spread the load of hospitality Strané introduced them to his cousin Paul, and pretty soon Byron and Hobhouse were involved in a tug-of-consuls: consuls, moreover, who represented countries at war, as on cousin Paul’s flagpole flew the colours of France, Sweden and Russia. Both consuls outbid each other to entertain their visitors, but it seems that cousin Paul pulled harder and they stayed under Napoleon’s protection, and dined on his Imperial extravagance, while waiting for the convoy.
Byron was anyway by this stage engrossed with the first draft of Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage, and as always his creative impulses were aroused best at night. Hobhouse, in his diary entries for his time in Patras, seems rather bored and lonely. He amused himself with inconsequential day trips while his travelling companion slept the days away and worked through the nights. At least Hobhouse - and Byron - were consoled by the return to civilisation, writing that ’after a long disuse of tables and chairs, we were much pleased by these novelties.’
Cousin Paul kept a good kitchen too, and entertained lavishly. One evening, a fellow guest, a Greek doctor, told the story of Ali Pasha and the French General Rosa. The latter had gone to Ioannina to marry. We know not why. Ali Pasha took umbrage, possibly because he had not been the guest of honour. He invited the general into his palace as a guest for further celebration, had him seized and carried on a mule to Constantinople where he died of fury and a broken heart in prison. Byron must have filed the story under ‘Plots’, for this is the DNA of Don Juan, with Ali Pasha as Lambro and General Rosa as Juan.
Patras doesn’t sound like it was a place to tarry, unless one was absorbed all night writing an epic poem or waiting for mail in a packet. The Irish traveller and writer, Edward Dodwell, who was in Greece five years before Byron, wrote that Patras
was like all Turkish cities composed of dirty and narrow streets. The houses are built of earth baked in the sun: some of the best are whitewashed, and those belonging to the Turks are ornamented with red paint. The eaves overhang the streets and project so much that those opposite houses almost touch each other, leaving but little space for air and light, and keeping the street in perfect shade, which in hot weather is agreeable, but far from healthy. The pavements are infamously bad, and being calculated only for horses; no carriages of any kind being used in Greece.
Although Greece’s third city after Athens and Thessalonica, Patras today is rather unsure of itself. Its main point of pride is its leading role in the Greek War of Independence, when in 1821 the Greek flag was raised for the first time on Greek soil. The Turks responded by razing the town, leaving only the old Venetian castle which still overlooks it, and which is now its only grace, still intact. When the Turks were finally forced out - by the French as it happens - in 1828, the city was rebuilt on a grid pattern, but the earthquake of 1953 was as devastating as the Turkish revenge and the city now retains the grid but is saddled with horrible 1950’s concrete architecture. One needs to keep one’s eyes at street level, for here can be found the bars and cafés enlivened by its large university population. It’s a city for evenings and nights and weekends, but only, one would hazard, during term time.
Before leaving Patras Byron had some housekeeping to attend to, having finally los
t patience as well as too many piastres with the dishonesty of Georgiou the dragoman, who was dismissed for untold robbery and replaced by Andreas, a Greek of the English consul Strané’s employ who spoke Turkish, French, Italian and choirboy Latin. The latter he had learnt as a chorister in St. Peter’s in Rome, an item on his CV of which Byron would have approved.
If Patras has an identity crisis, their next stop, known as Vostizza to Byron, Vostizi to Strané, Aiyion in the Greek guidebook, Aigion at the port, Egio on the Michelin map, Egion in the Admiralty Pilot and Aigio to the locals has so many identities a crisis seems inevitable. The town now is entirely nondescript, the victim of two recent earthquakes and botched rebuilds. If earthquakes here are like buses in London one hopes that the next rebuild will be more sympathetic.
But stranded they were in whatever-it’s-called for over a week by foul winds. For Byron this was time well spent: the nights belonged to Childe Harold and the days to Andreas Londos, their host at Vostizza and the spark for Byron’s Greek consciousness.
Joy Unconfined Page 16